Barbed Wire: ‘The Hangover Part III’

Barbed Wire: 'The Hangover Part III'

Barbed Wire is the place where Criticwire celebrates the art of the pan. Here’s where you’ll find the roughest, toughest, funniest reviews, with easy access links to both article and author so you can follow more of their work.

After two movies and something like a billion dollars in worldwide grosses, we come at last to the splitting headache portion of “The Hangover.” In “The Hangover Part III,” Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) have just three days to find Leslie Chow (Ken Jeong) and $21 million in stolen gold or an angry gangster (John Goodman) will kill their buddy Doug (Justin Bartha). But even with that zany plot line, all those returning characters, and talented director and co-writer Todd Phillips, all is not well in Adorably Poorly Behaved Man-Child Land. The tagline for the movie is “The End.” According to critics, who’ve rated the film a C- on our Criticwire Network and given it a 22% (and falling) on Rotten Tomatoes, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Here are ten great lines from ten brutal reviews of “The Hangover Part III:”

“We know from ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ that Bradley Cooper can be an interesting and attractive leading man. Not here, he isn’t. His main role is to glare balefully at the other characters and mutter: ‘What the f*** are we watching?’ and, ‘Who gives a f***?’These are good questions, and ones to which I suspect the film-makers would find it hard to give a convincing answer.”

“Say what you will about the horrible, stupid, unfunny, dull, pathetic — and, did I mention horrible? — ‘The Hangover Part III,’ at least you have to give it this: The movie lives up to its name. It totally feels like a hangover. The exhaustion and aimlessness. The jackhammering that seems to be coming from inside your dulled, weakened brain. The overwhelming urge to crawl somewhere, curl up and cower, shivering until the horror passes. And especially the urge to drink heavily to chase away the pain.”

“The psychopathic Chow becomes a kind of storytelling force majeure, descending from the sky to kill inconvenient antagonists so Cooper, Galifianakis, and Helms won’t get non-giraffe blood on their hands.”

“Remember how, when ‘The Hangover Part II’ came out in 2011, everyone thought it was a mistake, a craven, misguided attempt to cash in on the surprisingly enormous success of the original? Turns out it wasn’t a mistake. It was genius. Bravo, Todd Phillips, who again co-wrote and directs. By dropping the expectations below whatever’s beneath the basement, ‘The Hangover Part III’ had to look good in comparison. And it does. But only in comparison.”

“I beg of you, don’t ask me to choose between ‘Hangover’ II and III. That would be like asking a mother to choose between her children, assuming she hated her children, never wanted to see them again and wished they’d never been born in the first place.”

“These movies are surely done now, and for that we should be grateful. They haven’t had any new ideas in two films. By ‘Part IV,’ we’d just see these actors sitting around a table, occasionally waving to the camera, checking their cellphones, stretching from time to time. That’d be an improvement, actually. That might be fun.”